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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22965199">Tells Me He Can't Understand His Luck</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanmyshuno/pseuds/sanmyshuno'>sanmyshuno</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Haze [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(All In Bucky's Head. No Actual Guts Or Gore), (Bucky And The Author Don't), (Just Some Bleeding), Blood, Bloodplay, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bucky Only Has One Arm Here Because Shut Up That's Why, Claiming, Cutting, Dom Steve Rogers, Dom/sub, Healthy Relationships, How Do I Tag, I Don't Even Know, Knifeplay, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Marking, Maybe A Light Medical Kink If You Wanna Think About It That Way, No Sex, Possessive Behavior, Safe Sane and Consensual, Stone Top, Stone Top Steve Rogers, Sub Bucky Barnes, Top Steve Rogers, marks of ownership, mentions of gore, no beta we die like men, scalpels</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 13:22:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,254</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22965199</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanmyshuno/pseuds/sanmyshuno</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky has always belonged deeply to anyone but himself.<br/>(All fics in the 'Haze' series can be read in any order, or as a stand-alone).</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Haze [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/665813</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>53</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Tells Me He Can't Understand His Luck</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I’ve been having some dirtybadwrong thoughts in my dumb and mean brain, only made worse after reading how the lead singer of Ludo describes the meaning behind their song “The Horror of Our Love”,  which is real fun so here’s a super softcore and left-of-base version of that — acceptable for public consumption!</p><p>Unbeta’d, all mistakes are my own. </p><p>Title from Tessa Violet’s “Haze”. Five works in and god do I wish I didn’t decide to name all these fics after one song because A. My titles are always too long and I use a lot of words and now I’m running out of useful lyrics and B. Listening to exclusively to Hozier recently makes me want to name everything after his songs but I’ve started a Trend that I need to continue.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <strong>Tells Me He Can't Understand His Luck</strong>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>
  <span>They’re in the kitchen, Steve drying the dishes from dinner and hanging them to pack away. There’s not much else he can do one-armed in the kitchen, something they had both learnt early on — Bucky’s need to please and anxiety of failure making it hard for him to chop onions or grind pepper and Steve’s god-given ability to turn his frustrations into easy methods of humiliation. So, now, he mostly stirs pots and chips porcelain when he heavy-handedly stacks plates on the shelf.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Right now he’s holding a glass, pub logo branded on the side of it, stolen at one point who-knows-when, and looking at the closed cabinet it should go it. “Help me?” he asks Steve over his shoulder, batting his eyelashes awfully and overdramatically.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve rubs the tea towel over the surface of a bowl, “how am I able to help you when you’re incapable of doing anything right?” he asks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can’t do anything right. That’s why I’m asking for your help.” This earns him a whip between his shoulder blades with a twisted lemon-printed tea towel. It doesn’t hurt but he plays it up like it stings.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t get smart with me,” Steve says abandoning the bowl and towel to open the cabinet for Bucky regardless.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky grins, “wouldn’t know how to”. He gives Steve a kiss on the cheek when he mumbles, childishly and as under his breath as someone like Steve could, </span>
  <em>
    <span>you coulda put it down, ya know</span>
  </em>
  <span>? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bowls and plates and glasses and pans are all stored away, tucked into their respective shelves, before Steve starts handing over fist-fulls of dried utensils that aren’t organised and are facing in different directions. It was annoying and, as much as Bucky knows Steve’ll play it off as a game, it was unintentional and that makes it better, somehow. It’s not done smoothly at all but it’s comfortable — the two of them brushing shoulders in the cramped kitchen space, both of them too large in an otherwise decently sized room — and the sound of Hozier’s voice crooning sweetly from the living room, Bucky’s phone docked on the speaker.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Until Steve hands Bucky off the large kitchen knife, handle first, bone-dried and gleaming under the harsh ceilings lights that are way too white-bright. Bucky’s handled a lot of knives in his time — from the rusty pocketknife his father gave him at seventeen to the Gerber Mark II he tried to kill Steve with, Bucky has held plenty. But something about this feels different.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was a chef’s knife, sharp and expensive, with its stainless steel blade and dark wood handle. Steve had brought it for himself when he started saying he was going to take cooking more seriously but it mostly just sits in their knife-block and gets unsheath for uses completely below its price point.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s very shiny and Bucky doesn’t notice that he’s been staring at it for too long, transfixed on his sort of distorted face in its reflective surface, until Steve nudges him to chuck a fork in the spoons section of their cutlery divider, “you good, Buck?” he asks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky scratches at the metal blade and hopes Steve feels stupid enough to believe he saw some caked-on food mess on it, “a’right,” he says and shoves the knife in the block the way the salesman said not to.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>'Cause the rest of you, the best of you, honey, belongs to me</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky has forgotten about it, chalked it up to invasive thoughts and shoved it to the deepest depths of his brain that he stores all the information that he’s bound to forget eventually. He and Steve cook and clean together, they go on dates and Steve makes him cry and gut-punches him as an apology. Bucky has ever learnt how to light a match one-handed. Everything was cool before one day, weeks later, Steve gets too impatient to use his shitty fingernails to open a package and came back with the same wood handle knife.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Somehow Bucky’s mouth feels dry, even with the way saliva is pooling on his tongue — too much and too thick. Plastic shipping bag opened in rough tears, Steve throws the knife on the coffee table without really thinking about it but Bucky’s body burns up like a fever at the way it clatters against the glass. He doesn’t know what Steve pulls from the bag because he’s too busy looking at the sharp tip of the blade and he swears it winks at him. He wants to jab it and see how much pressure he needs to use to make a pinprick of blood bleed from his thumbpad. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Buck?” Steve questions from the couch above him. Bucky is sitting on the floor. He’s usually sitting on the floor, not surrounded by wires and chips like he likes to be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, Steve?” he asks the company name imprinted on the knife. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You right?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>In the part of his mind that makes him find the idea of being choked to death hot, Bucky pictures Steve slicing his arm and it makes him want to grab for the forearm where only air lives now. “You know,” he says instead of nothing. He doubts Steve knows because he doesn’t even know.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t know,” Steve says and spreads his legs out, gesturing to the space between them, which Bucky hobble-crawls between. He sits cross-legged in the gap between couch and coffee table — a tight squeeze — with his back to Steve, head tipped back to look up at him. Steve takes Bucky’s face between his hands and it makes him think Steve’ll Spider-Man kiss him. He does and instead presses his cheeks together so he makes fishy lips. “Wanna clue me in?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He asks but doesn’t release the hold on Bucky’s face, rendering him unable to speak. Steve always lets him have an out in any situation but, between earnest eyes and work-rough hands, Bucky is weak, and he points to the knife. “Knife?” Steve guesses. Bucky mimes stabbing himself in the guts — soft and sensitive and weak and always exposed — “stabbing?” Bucky nods as best he can before pointing between knife and Steve and himself in a messed up of charades, “me stab you?” Bucky shoots him a thumbs up and Steve releases his mouth, “you want me to stab you?” he asks, proper.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky lips the dryness from his lips, “yeah,” he says barely above a whisper but it sounds like it’s being screamed directly into his eardrum.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve is silent for a minute like he’s trying to mull something over in his head. His pretty head isn’t always full of rocks. Grinning like he won a golden ticket (but instead of being Veruca Salt </span>
  <em>
    <span>he’s </span>
  </em>
  <span>Willy Wonker and Bucky is the unfortunate and ungrateful child who gets go to the murder factory) he pokes Bucky in the nose, “Oakie-dokie, leave it with me” he says, and gives him a friendly </span>
  <em>
    <span>tap-tap </span>
  </em>
  <span>to his cheek that leaves a rosy blush and a sting.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky leaves it with him. He lives it with him for a month and a half and it is absolutely because he was counting the days, making mental tallies on the gaol cell walls of his skull. Shipping bags arrive at their doorstep and delivery boys make Steve sign for boxes without any labels on them. And they all pile up somewhere Bucky doesn’t know. Steve isn’t the type to hide his buys, liking to shares his experiences with everyone he can. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But with a perfectly good chef’s knife and a decent enough Bucky here, what’s Steve waiting for?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>By the time Bucky thought he was going to have to get into an overly-scripted movie fight scene against the man who kidnapped his daughter in a restaurant kitchen to get what he wanted, Steve had dragged him away from where he was watching a timelapse of a lemon slice going rotten by a rough hand in his hair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Through faux protests, Steve drags Bucky into their bedroom. It doesn’t look like a hospital — like the harsher ones he knows or the soft and gentles ASMR sets he falls asleep to sometimes — but between the medical blueys and metal kidney dish it certainly makes him think about it; medical play, he quickly decides, isn’t his thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve lets go of Bucky’s hair and leaves him in the middle of the room, his bare feet curling in the shagpile rug for a lack of doing anything else. Steve tears open a box and pulls out two black disposable gloves and all Bucky can do is watch.  “Surely I don’t need to tell you what to do now,” Steve says as he snaps one of the gloves over his wrist and tugging it to suit his fingers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“But please do,” he says, tongue thick and heavy in his mouth. It doesn’t come across as bratty as it should.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve fits the other glove over his hand and flexes them both, “strip Buck,” he says through light lashes and darken eyes. And, with all the unpractised clumsiness from doing so one-handed and lightheaded, Bucky strips down. Steve doesn’t chastise him when he leaves his clothes in a rumbled pile beneath his feet so he kicks them haphazardly off to the side.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Laying down a layer of disposable metal sheets on the bed, over the top of a pristine white sheet that still had the manufactured creases in them from their tight packaging, Steve gestures for Bucky to lie down. He compiles, sinking down the best he can without disturbing the protection underneath him. The bed feels funny to lay on and he quickly realises that </span>
  <em>
    <span>underneath </span>
  </em>
  <span>the sheet is plastic protection.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>To protect their sheets — quatrefoil navy and grey — but not these </span>
  <em>
    <span>white </span>
  </em>
  <span>ones. Bucky wiggles like the horny worm he is.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve smiles down at him, sinister and predatory, and Bucky feels like he’s a jackrabbit on the table ready to be skinned and bisected. With gloved hands, Steve pokes around Bucky’s body — jabbing his chubby middle, tapping against his surviving limbs — </span>
  <em>
    <span>inspecting him</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky shivers. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m thinking,” Steve says like he </span>
  <em>
    <span>had </span>
  </em>
  <span>been thinking, “when I do this it probably won’t scar. But you would like it to, right? Be scarred forever — because of me,” he sounds as disappointment as Bucky feels, “but that’s okay, you already have a lot of scars,” he slides an index finger down a short and ugly looking thing on his inner forearm, “and not all of them are mine,” — Bucky shivers — “and I think I should make them mine”.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky </span>
  <em>
    <span>is </span>
  </em>
  <span>covered in scars. Tiny pinkish nicks and larger puckered scarring marring his entire body. All of them date back to before being injected with his knockoff serum and a lot of them even coming from the war itself. There’s some, though, that predates those. He doesn’t remember a lot of them but Steve does, every single one of them catalogued inside of that brain of his.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Some of them his, some of them not. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve takes Bucky’s hand in his, the contrast between black vinyl and Bucky’s skin does something that makes his stomach flip. Flipping it over, he says, “this one,” finger tracing the length of a scar, long and skinny, that lives on the meaty flesh of his palm, “is from when you cut yourself with a knife ‘cuz you were too busy lookin’ at me and not paying enough attention”.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sounds about right,” Bucky says, mostly unsuccessfully, eyes transfixed on Steve’s finger. At the way it skirts feather-gentle up and down. At the way Steve’s gloves look like they’re their own independent thing. At the way it sends sparks through his body at the silent, but still obvious, triumph Steve feels — you got this because of </span>
  <em>
    <span>me</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky feels triumph, too. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve lets Bucky’s arm fall,  dropping dead tree heavy against the mattress. Walking two fingers down the length of Bucky’s body, pointedly avoiding his stirring dick, until he reaches Bucky’s upper left thigh. Underneath dark leg hair, is a scar — it’s a long and pink thing, unnatural and jaggered, that curls slightly at one end. There’s a rolly desk chair off to Steve’s side that Bucky hadn’t noticed before and Steve brings it over to sit in, more level and comfortable he asks, “know where this came from?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky shakes his head, trying to rack his brain for anything that could even be remotely true, “no,” he says.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve smiles and Bucky doesn’t know if he likes it, “you were eight and I was bedbound. You had gone outside to play with your friends — climbing trees. You and this other kid, Henry — never liked him,” Steve tacks on and Bucky doesn’t like the tone of it, “were up real high and he started to roughhouse with you, like an idiot, and you fell. You were bedbound for a little while, too, afterwards”. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky knows none of that but nods in agreement anyway. Steve could say he broke an arm fistfighting Cthulhu and he would believe him. “Yeah, Steve,” Bucky breathes out because he thought it would somehow distract him from how close Steve’s hand is to his dick.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t like it, you know,” Steve says, offhandedly and mostly to himself, as he turns to their bedside table — empty of all their regular decoration — and begins to fiddle with something. It was a shaving razor, a bright purple one that clearly came from a pack of women’s ones. “I don’t like it. Someone else has claimed you. Someone else </span>
  <em>
    <span>owns you</span>
  </em>
  <span>”.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky balks at the comment, fists — one real, one imaginary — curling at his sides, “no — no, no one else. Yours Steve. Sir”. He doesn’t start to cry or try and reach out but he’s inches from the need too. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not yet you’re not,” Steve says and begins to slather Bucky’s thigh with shaving cream, thick and foamy and smelling faintly of lime. “But you will be”.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve makes quick work of shaving away the patch of hair around the six-inch scar. It’s a quick and clean shave and Steve’s wiping away the excess mess with a wet washer. It feels funny to have his bare skin exposed like that and Bucky feels oddly exposed. Steve traces his gloved finger down the length of the scar and the texture of vinyl against smooth skin feels odd — not in a good way, not in a bad way, just </span>
  <em>
    <span>a way</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Throwing his gloves, that are now covered in shaving cream, in the little trash bin beside the bed, Steve puts on another pair of them from the box. Pulling out a square packet, Steve rips it open and starts swabbing the bald patch on Bucky’s leg with the alcohol wipe. He goes through several before he’s happy about how clean Bucky’s leg and his new gloves are.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The way he moves — clinical and surgical — with ease makes it feels like he’s practised this, made an effort to know what he was supposed to do, as opposed to what Bucky was thinking — taking that wooden-handled knife to his stomach and seeing how many slices it takes to get to his centre. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky knows that if you were to reach inside of someone’s body from their tummy, the closest you can get to the heart is the spleen.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Satisfied with how sterile everything is, Steve picks up a small black case. So innocent Bucky doesn’t even trust it. Steve unzips it and Bucky catches a glimpse of what’s inside — a scalpel handle, shiny and silver and catching the light. Beside the handle with four, packaged, no. ten scalpel blades. He shivers and curls his toes against the white underside of the bluey. Steve attaches one of the blades to the handle and tears off the wrapper and it suddenly feels all too real.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Kiss it,” Steve says, brushing the blunt side of the blade to Bucky's mouth. And he does — the metal's fairly cold, leaving behind a faint coolness after Bucky presses a kiss to the scalpel. He imagines this is what feeling the touch of a ghost against him would feel like. He knows this is what being cryogenically frozen feels like. He shivers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Who do you belong to?” he asks, trailing a fingertip against the length of the scar.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You, Stevie, always,” Bucky says in almost a breathless moan. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve digs a protected nail into the scar, tip biting into the flesh hard enough to make Bucky’s breath to hitch. “Not yet you’re not,” he says, “this doesn’t belong to me”.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“But it will”.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve smiles as he rubs down the blade with another swab, “you ready?” he asks and Bucky doesn’t know what’s more dangerous — the scalpel or Steve right now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I want to be hacked to pieces, let’s fucking do this,” Bucky says because terrible humour is the only thing keeping him from demanding Steve to perform an abdominal incision and jerk him off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I'm not gonna dismember you with a steak knife, Buck,” Steve replies with a roll of his eyes that feel terribly out of place right now. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m ready,” Bucky says, squeezed shut eyes directed towards the roof otherwise he’d be too tempted to stare at the blade or Steve or his cock, unbelievably hard and red, tip dripping wet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve lightly traces the scalpel — </span>
  <em>
    <span>the sharp blade </span>
  </em>
  <span>— against the scar, “what’s this one from?” he asks, an echo of what Bucky would ask him when they’re curled up in bed together, weak moonlight streaming in and trying its best to light their bedroom.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I fell out of a tree,” he croaks. Steve presses the blade down harder but not enough to break the skin. “I was shoved out a tree,” he tries again. This time Steve does pushing the blade down, sharp and careful, as the skin gently parts underneath the slow and meticulous — </span>
  <em>
    <span>practised </span>
  </em>
  <span>— cut. Bucky pries his own eyes open just to see the beads of blood well up from the shallow cut, right over the top of the scar.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The scar created by some kid named Henry.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Some kid named Henry left his mark on Bucky and probably isn’t even alive anymore to atone for staking the claim on something that’s not his.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve finishes the cut with the slight flourish that Bucky would’ve relentlessly teased him for if they were in a different situation. The bleeding is bright and beading and Bucky wants to suck the redden metal of the blade into his mouth. Pushing at a little flap of old scar skin, Steve asks, again, “who does this belong to?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span> “You,” Bucky says, tongue heavy in his mouth, “does it look?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It does look good.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fishing for compliments, huh?” Steve teases. He removes the used blade from the handle and cleans his hands.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah. Tell me I'm pretty,” Bucky says. He feels lightheaded and woozy even though he hasn’t even really lost any blood. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m </span>
  <em>
    <span>Captain America</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Buck. I’m a national treasure,” Steve says, “I can’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>lie</span>
  </em>
  <span>”. But he whispers praise about how pretty and how perfect it is to mostly himself as he cleans and dresses the area. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky can see the white and blue wrappers of the remaining three blades, “is there anywhere else?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Steve is quiet for a moment, eyes skimming the exposed expanse of Bucky’s body before pressing a sweetly gentle kiss to his hairline. Steve pokes at the scarring around Bucky’s stump, “what about these?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bucky squeezes his eyes and tries to unhitch his breath before speaking again.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Tellonym user: tellonym.me/sanmyshuno</p></blockquote></div></div>
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